Is Personal Finance considered Social Studies?

NiceUnparticularMan
Thu, 04 Apr 2024 21:22:51 +0000

Momof242729:

And it seems weird to me that colleges would penalize kids for doing exactly what the state mandates, and that they’re told is a college prep curriculum.

I understand where you are coming from, but I think it is useful to keep in mind that the most selective “national” private colleges do not really see rejections as penalizing kids. They can’t.

Because their AOs would all quit or go insane if they thought that way.
Generally speaking these AOs like kids, they like reading their essays and recommendations and so on, and yet they spend hour after hour, day after day, week after week, rejecting that vast majority of their applicants in the end. If they thought that was penalizing those kids, they couldn’t take it.

So, their basic mindset is even if this great kid is not accepted by me, surely they will be accepted somewhere else that is also great, and that is all fine. Again, it must be fine, they couldn’t handle it otherwise.

OK, so one of the things we know a lot of them do is take way more kids from independent private high schools than public high schools proportionately. And again, if they thought that was actually penalizing kids for going to public high schools, they couldn’t do it. But they do it, so they must not think that way.

And I think if you held them down and injected them with truth serum, a lot would end up admitting that they think the best result for many great public high school kids is to go to a great public university. Their public high schools were focused on preparing them for that, their families are more likely prepared to afford that, their families in fact have already in some sense chosen public schools over private schools before, and so on.

OK, so I don’t know this to be true, but suppose the NC public school policy you are describing actually has the effect of causing more NC public school students to end up in public universities, relative to otherwise similar NC private school students who are not subject to that same policy. I am pretty sure, again subject to truth serum, that these AOs for highly selective “national” private colleges would just say that was one more thing on a massive pile of things that ultimately leads to the observed effect that they accept more private school kids proportionately.

And they wouldn’t see that as penalizing those NC public school kids, because they can’t think that way about any of that.

Now, do you have to see it the same way? Of course not! But you have not been hired by one of these colleges to serve as an admissions officer and given mandates and policies designed to serve various institutional goals. They have, and if you want to go to one of those colleges, you have to understand that is the game you have to play. Meaning you have to show them you are a particularly good bet to serve those institutional goals.

If you fail in that, you will be rejected, and you might think that sucks, because you wanted to go. But they will not see it as penalizing you, they will just see it as doing their job to give their institution the enrolled classes it wants.

OK, so when people here try to share information we ahve learned to help kids better understand how these colleges think when making admissions decisions, we are not saying we agree with all of those policies! But if these kids want into these colleges, they need to understand what those colleges are looking for. And that includes understanding that these colleges simply do not, cannot, think in terms of whether a rejection amounts to an unfair penalty.